Recently I’ve been writing and publishing a series of articles on the vSphere Storage Appliance on the VMware Storage blog. There is quite of bit of interest on this solution now that it supports centralize and de-centralized management of multiple VSA Clusters. One of the new features of the VSA 5.1 is that it allows [...]

Recently I’ve been writing and publishing a series of articles on the vSphere Storage Appliance on the VMware Storage blog. There is quite of bit of interest on this solution now that it supports centralize and de-centralized management of multiple VSA Clusters. One of the new features of the VSA 5.1 is that it allows you to centrally manage multiple two node or three node clusters from a single instance of vCenter Server. I’ve covered the VSA centralized management for ROBO topic in lengthy details in the VMware Storage blog so I recommend reading those articles to get up to speed on that.

One of the big topics around the use of VSA for ROBO is around the correct use and deployment of the VSA Cluster Service (VSACS). It’s important to know that all scenarios that will be based on two clusters require the deployment of the VSACS. The requirements for this solution demands for the VSACS to reside outside of the resources provided by the VSA Cluster in order to avoid VSA Cluster service outages. The options available for the deployment of the VSACS range from using an virtual machine, an existing shared physical system or an inexpensive hardware appliance that meets the applications requirements.

So in an effort to simplify implementation and even possibly reduce the cost around the management and implementation of two node VSA cluster scenarios the utilization of the vMA appliance can be considered. The vMA appliance i snow build on top of one of the Linux distribution (SLES) supported by the VSACS and it presents the following benefits to this solution:

Preconfigured and support Operating system

Free of charge

Small footprint

In order to install the VSA Cluster Service bits on to the vMA appliance there is a required tool called (gettext) that is not part of the default installation of the vMA which needs to be installed before installing the VSACS. Im going to provide the step-by-step procedure on how to get this done. All the stuff I’ve learned about modifying and customizing the vMA appliance have come from William Lam (@lamw) one of my colleagues at VMware. If you want to know more about working with the vMA appliance check out his blog and particularly an article called Tips and Tricks for vMA 5.